Third Way Dispatch

Imagine this. You’ve been invited to give the keynote address at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention. You stand throngs of thousands with the American flag behind you and the words ‘… cold dead hands’ emblazoned on a screen. You begin:

For too long, those of us who support a drawdown in Iraq have offered a laundry list of reasons without a unifying rational. With more than 4,000 American fatalities and tens of thousands of life-altering injuries, it has cost too many lives; at $5,000 per second, it is costing too much money; with our allies looking on in disgust, it is tarnishing our image abroad; with a dizzying array of sectarian conflicts, it is a confusing and unpolice-able civil war; with its pretext long-since exposed as a fraud, it is based on a lie; and with the President’s legacy as “Worst Ever” firmly in place, it is a fruitless attempt to rescue the Bush place in history.

It’s hard for George W. Bush to find a new low, but yesterday he managed. Going to a foreign parliament and issuing a fatuous political attack is perhaps the most classless thing that he has done in the course of a breathtakingly classless presidency. And what an attack it was – standing before the Israeli Knesset, Bush summoned the ghosts of Munich in a loathsome attempt to link Barack Obama to the appeasers of old.

(visit our Adam Solomon tribute page)

It is with deep sadness that we today remember Adam Solomon, who passed away last night.

In Judaism, the highest calling is “tikkun olam” – the healing of the world. Adam’s entire being, his very soul, strove to meet that calling, to fulfill that injunction as if it were, in fact, the greater sum of all the commandments. And I saw his unshakable commitment to that calling as both a close personal friend and as a leader of Third Way.

NOTE:This Dispatch is by Third Way Senior Fellow Jonathan Morgenstein:

While I was living in Mexico City in February 1995, the newly elected Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo arrested Raul Salinas, the brother of Zedillo’s powerful and wealthy predecessor, Carlos Salinas. Raul was arrested for a high profile assassination among other suspicions. It was a glorious moment in Mexican history.

I am a big fan of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and so I was especially pleased to be asked by them to submit a piece in their special “What’s Next?” edition. My submission is about guns and about the fact that there are 280 million of them in private hands while there are also 300,000 gun crimes. That means that 279,700,000 guns did nothing wrong last year. It also means that we need a new strategy to go after gun crime and target the 300,000 problem guns as expertly as possible, while leaving the rest alone as practically as possible. Here is the link to the article – Deepen Gun Ownership.